New York graffiti
When a housing complex owner in Queens destroyed the graffiti on his property, he ended up paying $6.7 million to the artists whose work had been covering his walls for years.
This was some years back when a federal judge ruled that Jerry Wolkoff, the owner of the legendary 5Pointz graffiti complex in Queens, had to pay 21 artists who contributed 45 graffiti works to the space that were considered to be protected by law under the Visual Artists Rights Act.
Wolkoff destroyed the works in 2013, triggering the lawsuit in question. Before that, he had for decades allowed artists to tag the Long Island City structures, turning it into one of the city’s coolest art havens. When significant stretch of the murals at 5Pointz was whitewashed, lawyers defended the artists and called it “the world’s largest open-air aerosol museum.”